Partial purification and biochemical characterization of acid phosphatase from germinated mung bean (Vigna radiata) seeds

Mung bean (Vigna radiata) is one of the important crops of the North Eastern Region of India. In the present study, acid phosphatase enzyme was isolated and partially purified from germinated local mung bean seeds. The sequential partial purification process was performed using ammonium sulphate precipitation method. The crude enzyme having a specific activity of 0.50 U/mg was purified using 30 to 70% ammonium sulphate precipitation method. The acid phosphatase was purified by 2.6 fold with a yield of 58.9% and specific activity of 1.3 U/mg. One prominent band was obtained on sodium dodecyl sulphate-polyacrylamide gel electrophresis (SDS-PAGE) which confirmed the purity of the enzyme. Molecular weight of the enzyme was estimated as 34.5 kDa. The enzyme activity was measured at different incubation time, pH, temperature and substrate concentration. The activity increased slowly from 10 to 70 min of incubation. The maximum activity was obtained at 70 min, thereafter the activity decreased gradually. The enzyme was found to be active over a wide range of temperature (30 to 80°C) and maximum activity was observed at 70°C. The optimal pH value of the enzyme activity was found to be 5.2. There was a corresponding increase in the rate of reaction with the increase in the substrate concentration from 0.1 to 0.8 mM and a linear relationship was obtained at 2 to 8 mM. Both Km and Vmax value were calculated as 0.416 mM and 1.33 µmoles/min, respectively.Key words: Acid phosphatase, mung bean, Vigna radiata, enzyme purification, enzyme characterization

BGREI Impact on Productivity & Income from Rice: Western Vs. Northern Odisha

The article provides a comparison of the impact of the BGREI on rice productivity and income in the western and northern portions of Odisha in 2016–17. After consulting with scientists of ICAR-NRRI, Cuttack, 2 districts Mayurbhanj and Bargarh were selected as the research location. Two blocks from each district, 4 villages from each block were taken into consideration purposively and 10 farmers were selected randomly. Two pre-tested questionnaires were administered separately to the randomly selected beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries to collect the required data. After analysis of the data, it was observed that there is an increase of 8.83 quintals/acre (61.92%) in the productivity of Kharif rice in western Odisha, whereas in northern Odisha it is 6.1 quintals/acre (60.10%). Likewise, in case of Income from Kharif rice, there is an increment of Rs.12980/acre in western Odisha, whereas in northern Odisha it is Rs.8967/acre. After a critical statistical study, it was also clarified that there is no such major difference in the impact of BGREI on the income of rice farmers and productivity of rice, based on the location (i.e. between western Odisha and northern Odisha). It can be said that there is no such biasness in the BGREI scheme implemented areas of Odisha

A unified framework for managing provenance information in translational research

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>A critical aspect of the NIH <it>Translational Research </it>roadmap, which seeks to accelerate the delivery of "bench-side" discoveries to patient's "bedside," is the management of the <it>provenance </it>metadata that keeps track of the origin and history of data resources as they traverse the path from the bench to the bedside and back. A comprehensive provenance framework is essential for researchers to verify the quality of data, reproduce scientific results published in peer-reviewed literature, validate scientific process, and associate trust value with data and results. Traditional approaches to provenance management have focused on only partial sections of the translational research life cycle and they do not incorporate "domain semantics", which is essential to support domain-specific querying and analysis by scientists.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We identify a common set of challenges in managing provenance information across the <it>pre-publication </it>and <it>post-publication </it>phases of data in the translational research lifecycle. We define the semantic provenance framework (SPF), underpinned by the Provenir upper-level provenance ontology, to address these challenges in the four stages of provenance metadata:</p> <p>(a) Provenance <b>collection </b>- during data generation</p> <p>(b) Provenance <b>representation </b>- to support interoperability, reasoning, and incorporate domain semantics</p> <p>(c) Provenance <b>storage </b>and <b>propagation </b>- to allow efficient storage and seamless propagation of provenance as the data is transferred across applications</p> <p>(d) Provenance <b>query </b>- to support queries with increasing complexity over large data size and also support knowledge discovery applications</p> <p>We apply the SPF to two exemplar translational research projects, namely the Semantic Problem Solving Environment for <it>Trypanosoma cruzi </it>(<it>T.cruzi </it>SPSE) and the Biomedical Knowledge Repository (BKR) project, to demonstrate its effectiveness.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The SPF provides a unified framework to effectively manage provenance of translational research data during pre and post-publication phases. This framework is underpinned by an upper-level provenance ontology called Provenir that is extended to create domain-specific provenance ontologies to facilitate provenance interoperability, seamless propagation of provenance, automated querying, and analysis.</p

Electrified plasma in AdS/CFT correspondence

We construct new gravity backgrounds holographic dual to neutral plasma with U(1) global symmetry in the presence of constant electric field, considering its full back-reactions to the metric. As the electric field and the induced current cause a net energy in-flow to the system, the plasma is continually heated up and the corresponding gravity solution has an expanding horizon. After proposing a consistent late-time expansion scheme, we present analytic solutions in the scheme up to next-leading order, and our solutions are new time-dependent solutions of 5D asymptotic AdS Einstein-Maxwell(-Chern-Simons) theory. To extract dual CFT stress tensor and U(1) current from the solutions, we perform a rigorous holographic renormalization of Einstein-Maxwell-Chern-Simons theory including full back-reactions, which can in itself be an interesting addition to literatures. As by-products, we obtain interesting modifications of energy-momentum/current Ward identities due to the U(1) symmetry and its triangle anomaly.Comment: 27 pages, no figure, v3, minor typos fixed, matches with published versio

A Semantic Problem Solving Environment for Integrative Parasite Research: Identification of Intervention Targets for Trypanosoma cruzi

Effective research in parasite biology requires analyzing experimental lab data in the context of constantly expanding public data resources. Integrating lab data with public resources is particularly difficult for biologists who may not possess significant computational skills to acquire and process heterogeneous data stored at different locations. Therefore, we develop a semantic problem solving environment (SPSE) that allows parasitologists to query their lab data integrated with public resources using ontologies. An ontology specifies a common vocabulary and formal relationships among the terms that describe an organism, and experimental data and processes in this case. SPSE supports capturing and querying provenance information, which is metadata on the experimental processes and data recorded for reproducibility, and includes a visual query-processing tool to formulate complex queries without learning the query language syntax. We demonstrate the significance of SPSE in identifying gene knockout targets for T. cruzi. The overall goal of SPSE is to help researchers discover new or existing knowledge that is implicitly present in the data but not always easily detected. Results demonstrate improved usefulness of SPSE over existing lab systems and approaches, and support for complex query design that is otherwise difficult to achieve without the knowledge of query language syntax

Big data in epilepsy: Clinical and research considerations. Report from the Epilepsy Big Data Task Force of the International League Against Epilepsy

Epilepsy is a heterogeneous condition with disparate etiologies and phenotypic and genotypic characteristics. Clinical and research aspects are accordingly varied, ranging from epidemiological to molecular, spanning clinical trials and outcomes, gene and drug discovery, imaging, electroencephalography, pathology, epilepsy surgery, digital technologies, and numerous others. Epilepsy data are collected in the terabytes and petabytes, pushing the limits of current capabilities. Modern computing firepower and advances in machine and deep learning, pioneered in other diseases, open up exciting possibilities for epilepsy too. However, without carefully designed approaches to acquiring, standardizing, curating, and making available such data, there is a risk of failure. Thus, careful construction of relevant ontologies, with intimate stakeholder inputs, provides the requisite scaffolding for more ambitious big data undertakings, such as an epilepsy data commons. In this review, we assess the clinical and research epilepsy landscapes in the big data arena, current challenges, and future directions, and make the case for a systematic approach to epilepsy big data

Chiral Symmetry Breaking and External Fields in the Kuperstein-Sonnenschein Model

A novel holographic model of chiral symmetry breaking has been proposed by Kuperstein and Sonnenschein by embedding non-supersymmetric probe D7 and anti-D7 branes in the Klebanov-Witten background. We study the dynamics of the probe flavours in this model in the presence of finite temperature and a constant electromagnetic field. In keeping with the weakly coupled field theory intuition, we find the magnetic field promotes spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry whereas the electric field restores it. The former effect is universally known as the "magnetic catalysis" in chiral symmetry breaking. In the presence of an electric field such a condensation is inhibited and a current flows. Thus we are faced with a steady-state situation rather than a system in equilibrium. We conjecture a definition of thermodynamic free energy for this steady-state phase and using this proposal we study the detailed phase structure when both electric and magnetic fields are present in two representative configurations: mutually perpendicular and parallel.Comment: 50 pages, multiple figures, minor typo fixed, references adde

Scalar-field Pressure in Induced Gravity with Higgs Potential and Dark Matter

A model of induced gravity with a Higgs potential is investigated in detail in view of the pressure components related to the scalar-field excitations. The physical consequences emerging as an artifact due to the presence of these pressure terms are analysed in terms of the constraints parting from energy density, solar-relativistic effects and galactic dynamics along with the dark matter halos.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figures, Minor revision, Published in JHE